Grayfox

by Michael Phillips

  I tumbled down the last two or three steps, sprawling all over the ground. I wasn’t really injured, though I spilled my slate on the ground and got my face and clothes all dirty. But what really hurt was that a group of three or four other boys were standing nearby, laughing at me, like they’d been waiting around to see it happen. They were several of the boys who were older than me and who caused me the most trouble. They laughed and mocked and swore at me and called me names.

  I tried to pick up my slate and get up, but they shoved at me and pushed me back to the ground several times.

  Finally I got back to my feet and tried to walk away.

  “Not so fast,” sneered the biggest of the group—he was thirteen. “I’m not finished with you yet.”

  I was afraid to say anything but afraid to keep going too.

  “I want to know what it’s like having a no-good jailbird for a pa. So before I let you go, you answer me what it’s like being the son of an outlaw?”

  “My pa’s not an outlaw,” I spat back, forgetting my fear for a second.

  “You’re a liar,” the boy shot back. “Everybody knows what he did—and that he went to jail for it.”

  “He never done no such thing!” I shouted. Then like an idiot I dropped what was in my hand again and rushed at him.

  It was only a second or two before he’d slugged me twice in the stomach and once in the face and had me pinned to the ground.

  “Your pa busted out of jail!” he yelled in my ear. “You prob’ly don’t even know that, but he’s no good, I tell you.”

  “You let me go!” I cried. “Let me go, or I’ll . . . I’ll—”

  “You’ll what? Call your pa on me! Ha! When they catch your pa, you know what they’re going to do? They’ll hang him, and you’ll have to watch!” He laughed with an ugly sound, then ground my face into the dirt. The others were standing around watching and laughing and taunting me too.

  I tried to keep my eyes from shutting, but it hurt so bad where he’d hit me and now kept pushing and twisting at me. I tried to stifle my tears to show him I was tough, though I winced every time he’d jab at me or kick me with his knee.

  Never in all my life had I felt so helpless, so alone. And nobody was there to help me. The bully had me totally at his mercy. I never felt so helpless before or since.

  When the bully realized he couldn’t have any more fun with me, he kicked me several times in the ribs, then got up and left with the others, laughing till they were out of earshot.

  I laid there for another half an hour, crying both from the hurt and the humiliation. Finally I got up and staggered home as best I could. I met Tad, who was still expecting to go fishing. I said some things that weren’t too friendly to him, then went up and hid in the hayloft. The last thing I remember about that day is crying again till I fell asleep.

  I didn’t have no one to comfort me. I didn’t have nobody to tell me what to do next time. I couldn’t tell Ma or Corrie. That’s when I needed Pa more than ever—but I didn’t have a father to tell what happened.

  I suppose if I’d have told Pa all about it when I finally did see him again in California, he’d have felt just as bad, if not worse, than me about the incident. If we’d have talked about it, maybe the memory wouldn’t have stung in the same way it still did.

  But it was too late then. After we came west, I didn’t need a father the same way as back when I was younger. I was becoming more like everybody does the older they grow. The older people get, I suppose, the more independent they become. Those early years were gone.

  I was just about back to the station by then.

  I tried to shake all the memories clear from my brain. That was a long time ago, I told myself. I had to be a man now, whatever had happened when I was a kid.

  So a bully beat me up once. So Pa left. I couldn’t worry about it now.

  Besides, what would Hammerhead think of me if he knew what I was thinking about?

  Or Billy Barnes?

  Chapter 11

  The Accident

  The Paiute war continued on and off through the summer and fall. And our territory, out in the middle of nowhere away from where the army was around, was about the worst. I don’t know what it was about this lonely high desert that kept the Paiutes there—or how they could even survive in it. I couldn’t see that there was any food or water or shelter or anything. How could anyone live for as long as a week out in that bare wilderness! But they were always out there in the hills someplace as a constant threat.

  Most of the time, if you just rode fast enough and maybe fired a shot or two in the air over their heads, the Paiutes wouldn’t come after you. And since the Express had the best ponies in the West, as long as you had an arrow’s flight for a head start, there wasn’t much they could do to harm you ’cause you could outrun ’em.

  I only got chased two or three times those first few months, and then only from a distance. That didn’t keep my heart from pounding in my chest! But I just rode as fast as I could and stuck my pistol over my shoulder and fired a few shots behind me as I went, and that seemed enough to frighten them away. And all it took was another five or ten minutes in the saddle and I was out of their sight.

  What always worried me was what I’d do if suddenly a bunch of Paiutes appeared on the trail in front of me, too close for me to turn and hightail it out of there without getting an arrow in my back.

  It happened to Pony Bob Haslam once. He was riding along full tilt and rounded a bend and suddenly found himself reining in his pony smack in front of thirty mean-looking Paiutes. When the dust and hooves and commotion all settled down after a few seconds, there he was, just one young white boy staring back at what looked to him like a couple of dozen bloodthirsty red savages!

  I don’t know if half the stories about Pony Bob are true or not. But the way Mason Walker told it was like this. After sitting there staring back at ’em for a minute or two, everything all quiet and still, Bob slowly drew out his Colt and started his pony off walking straight toward ’em. Holding his gun at his side, finger on the trigger ready to fire, he just rode up and kept going, right on through them, and nobody breathed a word. The Indians’ horses edged aside and let him pass, and he rode off in the other direction, looking back as he went, till he judged he was out of arrow range, and then he flew into a gallop again.

  I thought about that incident a lot, wondering if I’d have the guts to do the same thing if I ever got into the same situation. When it finally did, I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t as brave as Pony Bob or because the circumstances were different and the Indians weren’t as close. But for whatever reason I didn’t follow his example, even as much as I thought about it ahead of time.

  It was the first week of December, and cold. There hadn’t been any snow yet to speak of, but the sky was heavy and gray, and the wind cut right through. I was riding hard, not really thinking much about anything except how blamed cold it was.

  All of a sudden I stopped dead in my tracks.

  There they were, about a hundred yards in front of me. Twenty or twenty-five Paiutes, right in the middle of my path!

  For a few seconds I just sat there, surprised, scared to death, my heart beating.

  Then all kinds of possibilities started to run through my head.

  I was far enough from them, I thought, that if I turned around and made a run for it back the way I’d come, I was probably out of arrow range. But then the mail wouldn’t get through.

  Then I thought maybe I could head out into the desert and try to get around them. But then all they’d have to do was ride back along the road wherever I tried to circle back. I could ride an extra twenty miles only to find them still there on the road once I got back to it!

  Or I could do like Pony Bob and ride up straight through the middle of them and hope they didn’t kill me. But they might!

  All this went through my brain in a second or two. Then suddenly another thought came to me, but not something I was expecting. What I thought
of was one of Rev. Rutledge’s sermons from back at Miracle Springs.

  “Everybody faces different kinds of problems in life,” I could hear him say just as clearly as when we’d all been sitting in church listening to him. “For every one of you they’ll be unique. I won’t face the kinds of difficulties you will, nor will you face those that come to me.”

  You’re right there, Reverend, I said to myself. I doubt if you’ve ever been in a pickle quite like this!

  “There’s never a solution that will work for every kind of trial that comes up in life,” he’d gone on. “But there are three things you have to do to find whatever solution is right for your particular situation. Sometimes you have to face your problem head on. Other times, circumstances are such that you have to go around the problem to get to the other side. And finally, there are times when you need to just prayerfully and patiently wait for God to show you what to do. One of these three will succeed in surmounting all of life’s difficulties. But the one thing you can never do is to just ignore your problem and do nothing and hope it goes away on its own. It hardly ever will.”

  I was riding White Eyes that day, a little roan mare with a white face. There I was, my pony’s jittery feet prancing up and down on the rocky dirt underneath me, twenty or so unfriendly-looking Paiutes looking like they was about to let their arrows fly and charge me any second, and the words of an old sermon were going through my head!

  Then all of a sudden I started laughing!

  I couldn’t help it. It just seemed like such a crazy thing to be thinking about at such a time.

  Shoot, Rev. Rutledge, I thought, that advice of yours don’t do me a blame bit of good now! When you were talking about problems, you didn’t have no Indians staring you in the face!

  Then I even tried to do what he said you couldn’t!

  I stopped laughing long enough to close my eyes and count to ten. It had come to me that maybe I was dreaming or that the Paiutes were some kind of winter mirage. Maybe they would go away!

  One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . I counted slowly in my mind, but fast enough so that if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t be on top of me by the time I reached ten! . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten.

  I opened my eyes.

  The Paiutes were still there! They hadn’t moved an inch.

  I wasn’t laughing now. And the words of Rev. Rutledge’s sermon began to make more and more sense. I found myself wishing I’d paid better attention that day, wondering if he’d said something else you could do about your problem besides going through them or around them like I remembered.

  I probably could just keep sitting there, kinda combining the waiting and praying with hoping my problem would go away. But that didn’t seem too likely to work. If I sat there long enough, they were sure to attack—that’s just the way Paiutes were.

  That left only the first two possibilities.

  I didn’t really think that Pony Bob’s trick would work in this case. For all I knew this might be the same band of Paiutes he’d ridden through! Even if it wasn’t, they’d probably heard about the incident just like I had, and weren’t about to let themselves be outsmarted into letting another Pony Express rider ride through like that. If it did happen to be the same party, they probably thought I was Pony Bob and were sitting there figuring how to catch and kill and scalp me to get even!

  No, I figured my chances were about zero in a thousand of coming out on the other side of them alive if I tried to tackle this problem head on.

  I’ll have to say no thanks to solution number one, Rev. Rutledge, I thought to myself. And that leaves number two. This looks like a clear case of having to go around the problem!

  It was a pretty rugged area, almost mountainous, though off to my right was a pretty good-sized plain. The trail had been following the base of a steep ridge off to my left, the hillside was rocky and steep on that side of the path. On the top of the ridge—probably two, maybe three hundred feet higher than the trail—a flat plateau ran in the same direction as I’d been going. As I looked up I thought that if I could just get to it, I’d be able to ride along the plateau for quite a distance and still be going in the direction of the swing station about twenty-three miles away.

  Now, the plain off to my right wasn’t really all that flat at all, it just looked that way. Like so much of the Utah-Nevada territory, the ground was broken up by creek beds and gulches and little ravines. You couldn’t see any of them because they were all sunk down below the ground level, so as you looked out across the area, your eyes fooled you into thinking it was a nice flatland you could just ride across.

  Then an idea came to me.

  Maybe I could fool the Indians the same way your eyes fooled you when you looked out across the plain.

  If I hightailed it straight across to the right, making like I was going to ride way out into the plain and make a great big circle around them, I figured they’d bolt after me and try to angle themselves so as to cut me off. Then, after they were headed away from the road, I would dip down into a wash, get out of their view, and double back, keeping low in the ravines and creek beds until I got back to the road. Then I’d scramble up the other side, lose myself in the huge boulders of the hillside, and gradually work my way up to the top of the ridge. I’d ride along the plateau for several miles until I could find my way back down to the trail, well past the Paiutes, and continue on.

  It only took ten seconds to see the whole plan in my brain, and by the eleventh I was on my way!

  I suddenly dug in my heels and headed my pony off to the right, and the Paiutes took off too, angling across the plain to head me off. My plan was working perfectly!

  I rode for three or four hundred yards, then dipped down into a shallow, dry creek bed. I was glad there hadn’t been any big storms yet. There’d only been a little rain, and the runoff hadn’t started to make the ground wet and boggy in the hollows. I pulled my pony to a stop, jumped off, and waited for another ten or twenty seconds.

  Crouching down, I crept up to the wall of the wash, climbed up on a rock, and carefully peered over the edge.

  The Paiutes were riding furiously, expecting me to appear again any moment still riding in the same direction!

  I crept back in the direction of the road, leading my pony along the creek bed until we were deep enough below the level of the plain that I could mount her without being seen. Slowly I doubled back, staying low in the ravines and washes.

  Once I figured I was safe, I gave her my heels and lit out again, working my way through the maze of washes, ravines, and canyons, sometimes with rough walls of rock going straight up on both sides of me.

  It took a while to pick my way back, but eventually I made my way almost to the trail. Then I climbed up and out of the ravine I was in, galloped quickly across the trail, and tore into the rocky terrain on the other side. Within another minute I was out of sight and safely behind the boulders and ridges of the hillside. Now I had to work my way up to the plateau on top.

  The hill grew steeper and steeper the higher I climbed. From the trail, it had looked like a moderately easy ride, but now I found it was anything but. Small rocks and loose shale made the footing treacherous. There was no trail to follow. And I was still scared and pushing the poor horse too fast, which was a big mistake. The Express ponies were faster than anything on level ground, but they weren’t made for this kind of slippery climbing.

  We were probably safe from the Indians by now, and I know the pony was exhausted from not being used to the climbing. But by now I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I’d been riding six hours that day already, and I had another three to go to the next station. Trust the Paiutes to show up right in the middle of the longest stretch I ever had to ride between fresh horses! Fool that I was, I should have turned around and gone back eight miles to where I’d just changed mounts.

  I reckon I was three-quarters of the way to the top when I came to a little ledge that dropped off steep on one side but was fairly level along its surface
. It was only about a foot or two wide—way too narrow with the cliff falling off below—and I could tell the pony was spooked.

  It was a dumb thing for me to do. I knew enough about horses to know better. If Little Wolf’d been there he’d never have let me do it. But I was tired and still scared and anxious to get up to the top. So I leaned further and urged her into a trot instead of paying attention to her skittishness. She obeyed bravely and moved briskly along, but then all of a sudden the ridge gave way in front of us.

  It wasn’t much more than a jump of three or four feet to where the ledge picked up again. If we’d have been galloping on the trail below and come to a washed-out piece of ground twice that wide, she’d have leapt over it without even breaking stride, and I wouldn’t even have felt a bump.

  But this wasn’t the trail, and she wasn’t going fast enough for an easy leap. She hesitated, then reared!

  Now, I’ve stuck tight to many a jumpy horse in my day, but by that point I was so tired I was barely hanging in the saddle, and she took me clean by surprise. I toppled straight off her back, landing hard and crooked on my leg.

  I felt an immediate stinging pain. But there wasn’t time to think about it because I’d rolled over the lip of the ledge.

  It was steep, and I just kept falling! I rolled over and over, down across the hard ground, and slipping down along pieces of shale and bumping my head and arms and legs against rocks.

  It wasn’t exactly like falling over a cliff, but almost. I tumbled a long ways, flopping over and over, crunching and bouncing. The only thing I was conscious of was the sensation of falling—and pain all over.

  Pretty soon, my brain started to go dark, like a bad dream was fading away. I was still tumbling and rolling, but everything in my senses drifted into a slow, quiet distant haze, and finally into blackness.